Hungry, Cold, Scorched

New York State, not wishing to have a gun-toting Herrin (Ill.) within its boundaries, decided to tighten its criminal laws last year. The result was a batch of legislation, known as the Baumes laws, which went into effect in July, which increase the penalties on various types of crimes. The most important provision is that which sentences a man to life imprisonment upon his fourth or subsequent conviction for a minor felony. This particular statute has been the subject of heated legal debate and was "finally upheld by the New York Supreme Court last month. No doubt, it has made habitual criminals think twice before committing that fourth felony. Crime was reduced in New York in 1926 for this and other reasons (migration of thugs, more alert police forces, etc.).

While others asked the opinions of public officials on the Baumes laws, a feminine newsgatherer last week sought out her literary idol, Theodore Dreiser, the plodding individualist, whose trips to Sing Sing to watch convicts suffer were so necessary apart of his An American Tragedy (TIME, Jan. 25, 1926). He told her this:

"The question is whether or not the Baumes laws do anything for society on the whole. I think they do. ...

"You see, there are just two kinds of people in this world. One kind believes in organized life, in rules, in property; the other kind doesn't. I know a man who decided at 35 that he couldn't see the sense of belonging to orderly society. . . . When he had to steal for food, he stole. He was an extreme case, of course, but interesting to a man like me. . . .

"Now these Baumes laws--they came to be necessary because too many of the people on the other side of the human, fence began to run wild on our side of the human fence. . . . Remember that I think these Baumes laws, or any other of the type are just lazy. They don't get down to the cause of anything. They don't remember the filth and dirt in which these men live. . . . account what it is that makes some people get on the wrong side of the human fence.

"I realize it. I remember very vividly just how it feels to be hungry, damnably hungry, and not warm, and wondering where to sleep. Once you've had that, you can never afterward forget that somehow or other this society has a responsibility to its weak people who can't make peace with it enough to get on. Once you've been scorched--oh, well, I sound like a socialist."

Mr. Dreiser, long famed and poor, is now famed and comfortably housed.